I was hanging out with a friend of mine recently, and for some reason we started talking about different professions. My friend started telling me about a dinner she'd had with friends of hers where they were discussing another friend who had aspired to be a lawyer and had "made it" so to speak, but hated it. They started discussing his options and how he could always transition to non-profit work, which led my friend's friends to lament how depressing non-profit work is. They were discussing at length the drawbacks to helping professions, and meanwhile my friend was sitting there thinking 'well, that's kind of what I do.' Immediately, they realized their blunder and said, "Well, that's different, you get to do baptisms and weddings and such!" But really, baptisms and weddings are a very small part of the day-in-day-out grind of real life blood and guts ministry that often involves tragedy and death and crisis. And they really didn't understand how you could be attracted to that kind of job, because it's all just so dire. While she was sitting there and listening, she had an a-ha! moment, and what she realized is that the difference between their view and hers came down to faith.
I encounter this attitude all the time, and with good reason. There's an episode of Scrubs where Dr. Cox says something like, "In the end, all of what we are doing is buying time for our patients." That's kind of depressing. I mean, all their patients do die eventually, and will probably go out suffering. Church work is no different from health care or any other helping field in that way, if you think that death really does get the last word. If that's the case, then what we do really is depressing. In the end, all our parishioners are headed for coffins (as are we) and everything we do is just entertainment between now and then, right? Well, it kind of seems that way at times, but thank God what Christians do is so much more than that, otherwise I would quit and go make boatloads of money doing something in the corporate world.
I heard a fantastic sermon today by a classmate of mine in my preaching class. He was preaching on evangelism and used, interestingly, the story of Ananais, the guy who went to minister to Saul/Paul shortly after his conversion where he had been blinded on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). You don't usually hear sermons about evangelism based on this text, but what I heard was that the thing that leads us to minister to others in the world (and by minister, I mean love, care, heal, etc) is an encounter with the risen Christ. Paul had such an experience on the road and was struck blind, and then it was the encounter Ananias had with Jesus calling him to go to Paul which is what enabled Paul to go out and become one of the most effective evangelists in Christian history. It's through an encounter with Jesus that lives our transformed. And here's the thing. If you believe that the image of God is in all creation and that Jesus is present here, by encountering people in the world, we are encountering Christ. Even in the darkest, most horrible situations, Christ is there.
That's why one of the holiest moments I have ever experienced in my life was in a hospital room where a woman was dying and her family was grieving. There was darkness there, no doubt. Those people were in gut wrenching pain, and it's hard to think about them even now. But at the same time, it was in the midst of that darkness that the light shed through reading of a Psalm, through prayer, through advocacy shone so much more brightly. The Holy Spirit shows up in and around us, and it's often in the shit that we see the sacred most clearly. And in seeing the sacred--in encountering Jesus in a hospital room or the scene of a car accident or a family dispute--we are reminded that this stuff is not the end of the story. It's a little reminder that says that the last word is always victory over death, is always joy, is always resurrection. And that's how people can fight the tide of injustice and wade waist-deep in others' grief and brokenness day in and day out. Because we know that what we're doing matters. We know that we're helping people see the reality of God's promised future, and that someday there will be a holy city here with a river that waters trees which are for the healing of the nations, where there will be no more sorrow or tears, and where the gate of the city will welcome all people by day, and that there will be no night there. That's the reality that we hope for, hold to, and trust in.
So yeah, it's hard to be a leader when it seems like the world is going to hell in a handbasket at the speed of light. But for Christians, that's not the end of the story, and we hope that by what we do, we're taking part in God's mission to put this broke-down, messed up world back together. And that's a calling worth getting excited about.
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